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(1 Chronicles 1-2)
Continuing the story of David, we turn over to 1 Chronicles, another version of the story told in 1&2 Samuel, and today we get a lengthy, two chapter geneology, starting with Adam, including David, seventh son of Jesse, great-grandson of Ruth.
In the Bible, both the First and Second parts of the Story, there are very few dates. And the way the authors both viewed and recounted history was in the naming of significant individuals. And the history of a person was always placed within the context of their family histories. We see the same in the Gospels when we read about Jesus’ family history.
Such geneologies in the Bible are meant to show where a person came from, what inheritance they received, give the reader a sense of who they are by who their family was (for good and for bad).
In the electronic age in which we live, it seems geneologies have had a resurgence. Decades ago family trees were cultivated by those dedicated few willing to spend hours in the library, scrolling through microfilms and dusty books, but today, one only has to plug in a few names and they can find out all sorts of things.
Like learning about the “moon people.”
Our people came from eastern Kentucky, where there was a legend of moon people: babies who were born blue, most growing out of it, but some keeping the blue tint their entire lives. There are all sorts of legends and tales told about the powers these moon people were said to have, where they truly descended from (talk about the idea that we’re all made of stardust), but truth be told it’s just a circulatory disorder. But either way, there was only one family in eastern Kentucky where babies were born blue—and they share the maiden name of my grandmother.
I’m a novice, so I’ve never been able to trace a direct lineage—but in Kentucky, people with the same last name somehow tend to be related, which means that somewhere on my family tree, the leaves are blue–and somehow I’m slightly descended from the moon.
But there’s more to that in my family tree. Like a great uncle whom we remember in four days, having died at Pearl Harbor. Heroes, preachers, and tragic figures–rosey-faced Irish immigrants, and blue-skinned moon people. And somehow they’re a part of why I am here because they are where I came from—for better or for worse.
During this Advent Season as you gather for big family reunions like the ones we used to have in an Ohio farmhouse, look around you; ask to hear some stories about your ancestors. You may just learn a little about yourself.
See you on the moon!
(2 Samuel 1-4)
In the field after Jonathan shot the arrows to confirm David’s suspicions that Saul was out to get him; outside the cave where David had almost taken Saul’s life–in both of these situations, to Jonathan and then to Saul, David promises to look out for their family, and in today’s passage we see him follow through on that promise.
First, to begin part two of Samuel, an Amalekite comes to David and lies about killing Saul. If we take a narrative approach to the story, we know that 1 Samuel ended with Saul falling on his own sword, but here the Amalekite says that he was the one killed Saul. He lies because he thinks it will please David, knowing that he has killed David’s long-time enemy and that he would be well rewared.
Instead, the Amalekite’s plan backfires and David kills him–not the best of examples, but still keeping with promises he had made, in this case taking care of Saul’s family but avenging his murder.
Later in today’s passage, it is Joab–one of the captains of the Israelite army–who comes to tell him that he has killed Ish-Bosheth, Saul’s son, thus ending Saul’s reign forever and paving the way for David’s legitimate kingship. And like the Amalekite before him, Joab expects to be rewarded but is punished by death instead as David’s way of keeping the promise he made to Jonathan first, then Saul.
Okay … so we dont need to go around avenging people’s deaths to keep our promises to others, but what we do need to keep the promises we make. This is a lesson that comes up various times in the Bible, no clearer than in the sermon of James, who tells us to mean what we say by doing what we say (James 2.14-26). Just as I wrote about “sticking to our sorries,” so too does God’s Word tell us to stick to our promises.
In our lives, we’ve been on the one side–where we’ve grown up with people promising us they’ll do something and then never follow through with it. And we’ve felt that sting, that hurt, after looking forward to that promise being fulfilled and then slowly realizing it’s not going to happen. Consequently, we’ve also been on the other side, where we say we’re going to do something, but then factors both within and beyond our control come up that we find we cannot follow-through with what we said. Then we find ourselves always apologizing, trying to explain, trying to make it up to that person.
As I’ve grown, I’ve tried to learn not to make promises I cannot keep. There are lots of things I want to do in life, some that I try to do, but too often there are a lot I just cannot get to. So I try (and note the key word try) not to promise to do everything I want to do but only what I know I can.
A promise is something that should be thought-through before it is made. It is a precious thing, a promise, and ideally it should always be kept. And to do so it requires forethought and follow-through. It’s always better to let someone down upfront than to try and make up for it in the end.
The Advent Season reminds us that there is always one person who keeps their promises. God has promised to love us, God has promised to forgive us, God has promised to save us, God has promised us a life like no other. In Jesus Christ, God is keeping all of those promises, now as God has and will always do.
So let us live by God’s promise today by taking the promises we make seriously–thinking them though and then following through with them.
(1Samuel 18-21; Psalm 18)
David was serving in the Philistine army. What better place when the leader of your own country was hunting you down? Yet as the Philistine army was marching to war against Israel, God stepped in to prevent David from having to fight his own people.
Though seemingly committed to follow through and fight with the Philistines against his own people, committed either because he felt he’d never go back or because he needed the protection of the foreign army, the Philistine commanders were doubtful whether or David would actually fight or not. They considered him a liability, so they dismissed him. And David willingly left.
But when he returned to his current “home away from home,” he found that it had been raided, everything taken–included his two wives, Ahinoam and Abigail. His anger alone wasnt enough to have him set off against the raiding army. Considering the odds, how much distance they might have already put between them, David needed motivation.
So he turned to God. Through prayer he plugged into God’s strength and encouragement. “Can I do it?” David asked. “Of course you can,” God answered.
Can I do it? How often do we ask ourselves that question, but at those times the answer we most often give ourselves is, Of course not. You’re not good enough. You dont have the resources. You dont have what it takes. It’s that ugly voice in our head that creeps in when we’re tired, frustrated–when life piles up like two feet of slushy winter snow and all we have is a garden spade.
That’s when we have to go to God with it. The only voice that drowns out the other is God’s gentle yet firm one. “Can I do it?” Of course you can!
That strength … that strength that we recognize near the end of a long trial, when we sigh, “I didnt know I had it in me.” That strength comes from God. When the snow is just about cleared from the drive. When the credit card balance is finally three digits. When exam week is just about through. The last round of treatment. The morning you wake up close to a year after a loss and you realize that it is getting a little better. What got you to that point? God’s strength, the strength that came because you trusted God with it.
Can you do it? Is the next year the one when you turn it all around? After a long weekend that only delayed the inevitable challenges of the week to come, do you have what it takes to face them with confidence and strength? Of course you do, because God is already waiting there to face them with you.
Daniel 5.1-12
The apple doesnt fall far from the tree they say. Belshazzar, just like his father—in his early days.
Idolatrous. Tyrannical. Heedless of God. Drinking from gold and silver bowls that were not his own—trophies from his father’s campaign against Israel. Worshiping gods made of the same. Probably thinking one day he’ll take down Nebudchadnezzar’s statue and replace it with his own. It must’ve been quite a party.
Especially when the hand started writing on the wall.
Dear old mom. Father gone, she bore witness of how Daniel helped HIM. The same remedy.
Like father, like son. Tormented by dreams and visions. Maddened by selfishness, drunk on power.
I knew a family. Broken family. Parents each with problems of their own, and two children growing up. One, rebelled against their parents—swore they’d never be like them. Yet still you could see the love. But they saw. The child saw that the traps the parents had made for themselves in their lives didnt have to be ones own.
The other child, though, fell into those same traps.
Certainly it wouldnt be that Beshazzar wouldnt end up mad in the wilderness, long hair and talon nails, like his father. When Daniel interprets the dream, he’ll get it—right?
Daniel 4.28-37
King Neb. The episode of the fiery furnace wasnt enough. Nor Daniel’s interpretation of his second dream. King Neb wasnt far removed from the man who had built a statue to himself. Seems nothing could make him wholly devoted to the Lord God and less to himself.
Walking around, looking at Babylon, patting himself on the back. “Look at how awesome I am!” And immediately, a voice from heaven, saying “I’ll show you who’s awesome.”
Driven into the wilderness, mad. Resembling the strange man in the alley behind the diner in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Dirty, wild hair, nails like talons.
This is where our own selfishness can lead. We will drive ourselves mad, always trying to do what we want. Drive ourselves mad striving for the acclamations. The price of egotism is madness.
But God brought King Neb back, restoring his sanity. After seven long years, King Neb was back. But not as he was. He had learned that there is only one awesome thing—one awesome being in the universe—the universe of which God is the center, not us.
It’s okay to be proud of ourselves. It’s okay to pat ourselves on the back. It’s okay to celebrate our accomplishments and successes. Like finally getting a teaching license. Finally getting ordained.
When people say they’ve enjoyed a sermon—or one of my children’s songs—it feels good. It feels good to have a nice article written about you in the paper. Good when people say it’s the best wedding they’ve ever been to, or how much they miss you. But that feeling … that goodness. That’s God.
When we get it right, when we feel that good, there is only one explanation—only one source for the goodness we feel. God. Because it is God who has done great things, and if through us—what a feeling!
Dont drive yourself mad thinking how awesome you are. Feel good about the kinds of goodness God can do in and through your life. It’s pretty awesome when God does.
Daniel 3.19-30
Three men were thrown into the fire, but four endured it.
King Neb was furious at Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for not bowing down to the monument in his likeness that he had made for himself. He ordered the furnace turned up from char to combust—soldiers, it seems, literally burst into flames when they threw the three men in. And just to make it worse, they were thrown in fully dressed as if for a winter’s hike on the Yellowood Trail.
When the king looked into the furnace, he didnt expect to see men walking around—much less FOUR men. And he certainly didnt expect them not even to break a sweat.
Isaiah said that when we pass through the water, God would be there; when we pass through the fire, God would be there. And we certainly see that in the story of the three men—God w/ them in the fire. Note especially the word “when.” Not “if.”
There will be furnaces in our lives. No, not the fiery furnace of hell which childhood preachers told me to fear w/ a fear that kept me up at night. Furnaces meaning trials—tests of faith. The true test for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego was not the heat of the furnace but the depth of their faith. Saying “No” to the king, regardless the punishments, in order to say “Yes” to God. The furnace? God took care of that.
God walks ever beside, behind, and beyond us. Always there. When the heat gets turned up in our lives—professional, personal, social, spiritual—when the heart races and thoughts spin, while we just try and hold on—GOD IS THERE. When we walk, wherever we walk, there is never just one but always two. Not Marley, but Majesty and me, just as there were four men in the furnace when there should’ve been three.
Daniel 3.1-18
Monuments. They are all around us. Monuments to heroes. Monuments to progress. Monuments of finanical institutions. Monuments of fame.
Yankee Stadium. The house that Ruth built. Now fallen. The balls are leaping off bats in the new one and no one watches. No one can afford to. Ticket prices too high. Make the maximum withdrawal in order to eat hot dogs.
Continuing on in Daniel, we draw nearer and nearer to the fiery furnace we remember from childhood stories. A monument of the king built BY the king for the people to worship. Most of them. But not Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They were faithful Jews who learned from stories of golden calves and followed the Torah—no graven images. And they were willing to face the furnace, certain that God would be with them, as long as they didnt bow before any monument to one whose power was only fleeting, regardless of what he thought.
Monuments. There are monuments to God all around us, but they arent of human hands. The hills brushed with the green of spring. The fields dashed with hints of purple. A bird sitting on her nest, watching over new life. Clouds filling the sky. The moon surrounded by winking stars. All of creation is a monument to the Power of life, filling all the world.
We pass by. We look to what men have made, and what they have destroyed. Rockets to the moon pale in comparison to the lunar orb that circles us nightly, reminding us that life has its rhythms, time its cycle, and that things must live and things must die.
“We will not bow to your gods, nor worship your monuments.” We worship what cannot be recreated yet is recreating life all around us as Spring opens up the wonder of a life that goes on. We need not fear the fiery furnace as long as we live worshipfully, bowing our will to the God, the monumental wonder of the world.
Daniel 2.31-49
Daniel remembered his friends.
When last I blogged from Daniel, through which we are currently reading through when following the Daily Office, King Neb had put unrealistic expectations on his advisors; however, Daniel knew that what impossibilities may face a person, God can do the impossible. So strengthened by God and filled with God’s wisdom, Daniel puts himself in a dangerous position for the sake of others when he goes to tell the King both the content and the meaning of his dream.
He does this not just to save his own neck but those of others—including the Babylonian advisors, who couldnt save themselves. Before the King, Daniel is bold and confident b/c he knows that what he shares with him is the truth, b/c it comes from God. And it’s a hard truth. The truth of a divided kindgom. A truth the King may have a hard time hearing. But, b/c it was the truth—even a hard truth—King Neb rewarded Daniel, promoting him to a high position, lavishing him w/ gifts.
But even then, Daniel didnt stop thinking of others. “What about Shadrach, Meshach, abednego? King Neb … think you could take care of them too?”
Most people, having climbed their way up from the bottom, forget those around them. In the world of self-made men and women, so many are focused so much on personal gain and accomplishments that they forget those around them when they make it to the top.
A similar story to Daniel’s is that told in one of my favorite movies, “The Fisher King.” Once Jack (played by Jeff Bridges) gets back on top after falling so far down, he doesnt forget his good friend, Perry—the homeless man he befriended when he was down (an Oscar-worthy performance by Robin Williams) and goes on a “quest” for him—once again risking his very reputation if he failed.
Daniel risked his life for others when he went before the King, and then further when he asked a favor for his friends. A very Christ-like act, for what better example of one who put their life at risk for others than Jesus Christ? Rather than just keeping all the heavenly reward for himself, Jesus Christ put his life on the line—on the cross—so that we too might share in that reward, just like Daniel’s friends.
Therefore, we are challenged to do the same for others. Not to forget them when we reach the top—when we are back on our feet. Gratitude. Vulnerability. Putting our lives and reputations on the line so that we are not the only ones who stand to gain.
Whatever we do in life—whatever accomplishment or success—there is always someone to thank. So when you reach the top, remember to thank God and everyone else you can think of.
Daniel 2.1-16
Unrealistic expectations. Nebuchadnezzar had unrealistic expectations for his advisors. He had a dream, and rather than just ask them to do the Jungian thing and interpret it for them, King Neb asked them to play conjurer as well. “Tell me WHAT my dream was, then tell me what it MEANS.”
The advisors had every right to protest, AND Nebuchadnezzar had no right to threaten them with execution. It’s a lot like the situation we saw played out yesterday in the latest episode of our Horatio Hornblower marathon. (We’ve been borrowing the A&E series from the library and just finished episode six, “The Mutiny.”) Captain Sawyer was going mad, paranoid, doped up on laudnum. He placed unrealistic expectations on his officers—including making Hornblower keep two watches for thirty-six hours straight w/o falling asleep. It was no surprise that later Horatio was nodding off, but for Sawyer to threaten him w/ execution …
How the officers felt on that ship must’ve been how the advisors felt about Nebuchadnezzar. And though we dont finish the story today, we do have the hint of how they might be spared and of what’s going on. It’s not a test of men; it’s a test of God, as even one of the advisors admits: “What Your Majesty is asking for is so difficult that no one can do it, except for the gods, and they do not live among human beings”(v.11, GNT).
Indeed this is the point. And it’s a similar point Jesus himself would later make. When the rich young man comes, asking what he must do to follow. “Give up all you have and follow me.” Impossible. “Maybe,” Jesus said. “But what is impossible for human beings IS possible for God.”
Unrealistic expectations. That’s the kind only God can meet. And though bosses, teachers, leaders may place them on others, setting them up to fail, when it comes to what God can do, we should have no expectations—only wonder.
Daniel 1.1-21
Nebuchadnezzar. (Ya gotta have a feeling that the spell checker is going to look at that one and say, “What?”) KING Nebuchadnezzar—looking for help. But not everyone qualifies. Only handsome, intelligent, well-mannered young men. Still for Daniel and his friends, it was the chance of a lifetime.
But there were some things that Daniel wouldnt compromise, just to impress his boss. In particular, what to eat.
We as Christians, most Christians—we dont have dietary laws, so we dont understand. Not eating kosher, for some, is equivalent to sin. For Daniel, he would’ve knowledgably taken something into his body which would make him unholy. And the Babylonians knew it. Forcing the young men to eat a Babylonian diet—it was one expression of conquest, of reminding who was the ruler, and who the slave.
So most went along with it—better to be unholy and alive. Not for Daniel. But instead of simply defying the orders, he turns it into a challenge. “I bet you that my diet can beat up your diet.”
Cave in or stick to your convictions. That’s a position into which many situations place us … with the decision of just going along with what the group is doing, with orders regardless how immoral, OR sticking to your convictions. Pressured, ordered to do something against your will, saying instead “No thanks, I’m good.”
